That's your descision. I, on the other hand, am of the belief that by the time we get to the stage of having several dozen planets in the solar system, then we'll need a term which defines the ones that we care about.
And I think that the term 'planets' for the ones we care about works, and 'dwarf planets' for the ones we don't care about works also.
I agree with you, angoel. At the end of the day, Pluto doesn't care how we define it. But since it's clearly one of the Kuiper Belt objects, like "Xena", calling it a planet would mean we'd have to call them all planets, or at least all the larger ones. It's only been called a planet historically because it was originally thought to be bigger than it is, and because we didn't know it wasn't unique.
Yup - eminently sensible decision - we can't go calling all large Kuiper Belt objects planets! And Pluto isn't even a solo Kuiper Belt object, it's actually twinned, it doesn't follow a "proper" orbit in line with the major planets, and keeping Pluto as a planet would've had the absurdity of having to also count Ceres and a while load of other vaguely round stuff planets as well.... we'd've had hundreds of the darned things :-)
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timeasmymeasure
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Date: 2006-08-28 03:50 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2006-08-28 04:07 pm (UTC)And I think that the term 'planets' for the ones we care about works, and 'dwarf planets' for the ones we don't care about works also.
Your milage may, of course, vary.
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Date: 2006-08-28 04:20 pm (UTC)I think this is a very sensible decision.
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Date: 2006-08-28 08:11 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2006-08-28 04:46 pm (UTC)This, of course, begs the question of who is doing the caring.
It's not a real scientific way to decide nomenclature.